The Troll of Dreadmist
They didn’t call it a hunt.
No one in Agrovionimb called anything in the swamp a hunt anymore.
It was a problem.
Word reached the city through fishermen working the inland edges of the marsh—something large had been seen moving where the reeds met the black water. Nets came back torn. A skiff was found half-sunk, its hull peeled open like fruit.
The Council did not send soldiers.
They never did.
Instead, a call went out:
twenty volunteers.
Dockworkers. Hunters. Guards. A few who simply wanted to prove something.
And seven who would return.
They gathered at the edge of the central wetland—the place where stone road gave way to mud and the air changed.
The Dreadmist Swamp was not like the rest of the island. It breathed differently.
The mist hung low and heavy, clinging to skin and lungs. Sound carried strangely—too far in some directions, not at all in others. The water did not ripple the way it should.
Even before they entered, some of the twenty were already quiet.
Anchor Buhralmath walked at the center of the group, metal frame steady despite the sucking mud.
Pethi moved lightly ahead of him, testing each step like the swamp itself might react.
Venathrax complained loudly for the first hour. Then not at all.
Vash kept talking—half jokes, half bravado—until even he ran out of things to say.
Wrenn refused to look at the water.
Xam watched everyone else more than the swamp.
Corq stayed close to Anchor.
They found the first body before noon.
Or what was left of one.
Not from their group—someone older, weeks gone, half-swallowed by mud and insects. The swamp didn’t preserve things. It reclaimed them.
After that, they stopped speaking entirely.
The deeper they went, the stranger it became.
The ground shifted underfoot without warning.
Pools appeared where none had been moments before.
The mist thickened until shapes moved inside it that might not have been real.
Something screamed once—far away.
Something answered.
They found the troll at dusk.
Or maybe it found them.
It rose from the water without sound.
Too large.
Too wrong.
Not just a troll, but something that had lived too long in that place. Its skin hung in thick, waterlogged folds. One arm dragged slightly behind it, longer than the other, fingers trailing through the muck like roots.
Its eyes reflected nothing.
For a moment, no one moved.
Then it charged.
The fight wasn’t clean.
There was no formation. No tactics.
Just survival.
Anchor took the first blow.
The impact rang like a hammer on steel, sending him half a step into the mud—but he held. Something in him flared then, a faint green light beneath his plating, something none of them had seen before.
Pethi struck fast—precise, controlled—but the creature barely seemed to notice.
Venathrax’s magic burned, but the thing didn’t fall. It just kept coming.
Wrenn called to something in the earth—or the swamp—and the ground itself seemed to resist the troll’s movement, just enough.
Corq’s spells flickered, uncertain but real.
Vash moved when no one was looking—cutting, slipping, surviving.
Xam… stayed alive.
That was its own kind of skill.
The others—
They didn’t all last long.
The swamp swallowed some.
The troll took others.
A scream cut off mid-breath.
A splash.
Silence.
At some point, the fight stopped being about killing the thing.
It became about ending it before it ended them all.
Anchor held it.
Not gracefully.
Not heroically.
He just… didn’t fall.
Even as the creature tore at him, something in his frame burned brighter—green light bleeding through seams that had never shown light before.
That was when the others struck.
All of them.
Everything they had left.
The troll went down in pieces.
And still twitched after.
No one celebrated.
No one even checked if it was truly dead.
They just stood there, breathing, listening to the swamp close back in around them.
Seven remained.
The journey back was worse.
Because now they knew what the swamp could take.
When they reached the edge of stone again, no one said anything at first.
The city was still there. The harbor. The distant sound of work in Ashrack.
Normal life.
As if nothing had happened.
Later, people would call them heroes.
Not loudly.
Agrovionimb didn’t do loud heroics.
But people would nod when they passed. Leave a drink waiting. Ask quiet questions they didn’t really want answered.
Seven returned.
That was enough.
And from that day forward, whether they wanted it or not—
They were no longer just citizens of Agrovionimb.
They were people who had seen what waited in the swamp…
…and come back.